Sometimes we mistakenly think that all entities are conserved, like matter and energy – which can neither be created nor destroyed (or at least the sum of matter and energy cannot). With conserved entities, we have to budget, economize, ration; because once we devote a certain unit of them to a particular use or purpose, we cannot then have it also available for other uses. Time and space are like that too: if you spend Sunday afternoon at a football game, you cannot also spend it at a concert, or studying, or walking with your boyfriend or girlfriend; if you put two beds in a small bedroom, you may not have enough space to also put a writing desk there. This is why time-budgeting is as difficult as money-budgeting – both time and money are scarce commodities. Money is a finite, exhaustible resource too, for individuals, households and corporations; some governments try to create money by printing more, but with dire inflationary consequences. All finite resources, of which the above are examples, obey the simple rule “you cannot eat your cake and have it too”.

But some entities are not conserved (in the sense of obeying laws of conservations); they are inexhaustible, capable of being freely created – but also subject to being destroyed. Love is like that: we do not love our parents less because we also love our spouses and our children; we can love God and our country without feeling a contradiction. But love can also be destroyed, by anger, jealousy, suspicion – or even just fade away with distance in space or time. We do not have in our hearts a definite quantity of love that we dispense to various persons or groups – we can have as much or as little of it as we please.

There was a story once about a land where people were in the habit of handing a Soft Warm Fuzzy to everyone they met – friend or stranger. These Soft Warm Fuzzies had the property of making the recipient happy. And so everyone in this land was happy, because these Soft Warm Fuzzies were being handed around so freely. Until…someone got worried that the people of this land might run out of Soft Warm Fuzzies, and warned that they should use them more sparingly, reserving them only for those very close or those most deserving. Then people became mean and handed out fewer and fewer of the Soft Warm Fuzzies, the more so because they were no longer happy, which made them less generous. They even worried that someone might steal the Soft Warm Fuzzies they still had right out of their pockets, and so they sewed their pockets shut – then of course they could not feel their own Soft Warm Fuzzies themselves and became very unhappy. Finally a wise woman taught the people to notice that, whenever they gave away a Soft Warm Fuzzy, another one grew in their pockets immediately – but that no new Soft Warm Fuzzy appeared if the old one was still in their pocket. So the people realized that they would never run out of Soft Warm Fuzzies if they were generous with them. So they started handing them out again to everyone they met, friends or strangers, and once again everyone was happy.

Unlike matter, energy, space, time, and money, love and friendship exist in a potentially inexhaustible supply. They are the ideal renewable resources – renewed without any effort at recycling or regrowing. They can be created on demand. Why then do we get jealous? Well, partly because we begrudge the TIME (a conserved entity) which our friends spend with their other friends instead of with us. And in the case of sexual lovers, there is also the question of limited physical ENERGY (a conserved entity), as well as parenthood of offspring. But partly jealousy stems from a misunderstanding about the nature of love as a non-diminishing entity.

In being able to be created and destroyed, love is a bit like information (see my essay The Three Essences). Yet it is also different, because love presupposes at least two persons who exchange or share it (even unrequited love involves two persons, one of them unwilling), while information can exist for only one person, or for no person at all – like a book in a long abandoned library.

Inexhaustible entities are not always positive, like love and friendship; they can also be negative, like anger or hate. Sometimes people, even psychologists, talk about anger as if it was a conserved entity. “What can a nonviolent resister do with his anger?” ask a Gandhian student, implying that anger (rage) is like a compressed fluid which will seek an outlet – if not in an explosion of violence, then in some sublimated form of behaviour.

This has been called “the hydraulic theory of the emotions”, and is much used in psychoanalysis. It teaches that strong feelings that are not acted upon overtly because of some physical or social block, are repressed into the unconscious, where they still persist (being indestructible), and cause various neurotic symptoms. The implication is that feelings cannot simply disappear into nothing; they have a certain mental ENERGY that is conserved, or maybe converted into other forms of energy (behavioural or psychosomatic symptoms). Or, in the hydraulic metaphor, the excess pressure in the compressed (repressed? how close these words are!) fluid is transmitted undiminished throughout the fluid and will make it squirt out at the weakest spot of the container.

I suspect that many psychologists do not fully realize that these are metaphors, not proven realities. Feelings of rage or frustration, or love for a forbidden target person, could just simply dissipate and vanish without trace, if these emotions are non-conserved entities. The evidence for either conservation or non-conservation of the emotions might be an empirically testable question, but I don’t know of any definitive tests.

If the emotions are not conserved, but instead can be created and destroyed, they are not mental “energy”, but mental “information” – they indicate to us, as a first approximation, how we might act in the given situation – but this information can be “erased” by reasoning in the higher brain centres. This “high command” can block the action as inappropriate, of course; but more than that, it can control or eliminate the feelings that accompanied that first impulse. Not immediately – perhaps it takes a little while – there is a sort of an afterglow of the rage or the regret over a forbidden love – but we recover completely, without any permanent load of garbage in the unconscious. At least we can do so most of the time, if we are mentally healthy and resilient. There are such things as injuries that do not leave behind any scars.

Also, if the emotions can fade out, there is no support for the assumptions about “catharsis”. For example, a deliberate discharge of rage against an object that cannot suffer or be damaged, such as a rag doll or an inflated punching bag, is supposed to “release the anger” inside a person (let the compressed fluid of rage squirt out), and prevent the venting of anger against a real live person (either the real frustrator or some substitute). This is reminiscent of those who would prevent large earthquakes by stimulating a series of smaller ones to relieve the accumulated stresses in the rocks on either side of a slip-fault like the San Andreas. I am more ready to believe this mechanism in the case of earthquakes than in the case of violence, because seismic energy is a conserved entity and the emotions may not be. In fact, there is some evidence that catharsis, as described in the above example, does not work; that usually a small discharge of violence only stimulates a later dangerous lashing out – perhaps because the discharge of anger is habit-forming – the person learns by experience how to lash out.

Another inexhaustible entity, this time a positive one, may be loyalty. Harold Guetzkow 30 years ago wrote about “multiple loyalties” of which people are capable. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that by being a loyal Canadian I am any less loyal to Ontario or to Dundas; and so, on top of all these other loyalties, I can also be loyal to the world and to humanity as a whole; and even on top of that, to all life on Earth. There need not be any contradictions, though contradictions may emerge if the governments of the various levels make contrary demands on me. Ideally, the multiple loyalties to various levels can be like the music of the spheres, a beautiful harmonic chord.

Just as it is a mistake to treat inexhaustible entities as conserved entities, so it is also a mistake to treat conserved and limited resources as if they were inexhaustible. Economists make this mistake, in forgetting that natural resources on Earth are finite and exhaustible, and that “sinks” for garbage and pollution are also not without limits. Economic theory of industrial production processes would look quite different if it took entropy into account, as Georgescu-Roegen suggested long ago. The production process up-grades raw materials (natural resources) into finished products only at the expense of the degraded energy and the waste materials that also come out of the process; i.e. we get the “bads” along with the “goods”, and generally more of the “bads” than the “goods”, because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What occurs is destruction of some of the “information” (negentropy) contained in the starting “factors of production” compared to the final products. Some of the laws of economics should be completely reformulated to take this into account.

Psychologists and economists both err, but for opposite reasons. Psychologists treat the emotions as conserved entities which they are not (probably), while economists treat resources and sinks in nature as inexhaustible, which they are not (with certainty).

It seems that physical entities are conserved and exhaustible, while mental entities are not conserved and inexhaustible. This might give us a clue as to where to seek better Quality of Life (what used to called “happiness” or “the good life”), rather than where we are wrongfully looking for it now.